Frank Harris - Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

F >> Frank Harris >> Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2)

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The warrant once granted, your will, of course, directed everything. At
a time when I should have been in London taking wise counsel and calmly
considering the hideous trap in which I had allowed myself to be
caught--the booby trap, as your father calls it to the present day--you
insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting places on
God's earth, that all day and all night as well, you might gamble as
long as the casino remained open. As for me--baccarat[46] having no
charms for me--I was left alone outside by myself. You refused to
discuss even for five minutes the position to which you and your father
had brought me. My business was merely to pay your hotel expenses and
your losses. The slightest allusion to the ordeal awaiting me was
regarded as a bore. A new brand of champagne that was recommended to us
had more interest for you. On our return to London those of my friends
who really desired my welfare implored me to retire abroad, and not to
face an impossible trial. You imputed mean motives to them for giving
such advice and cowardice to me for listening to it. You forced me to
stay to brazen it out, if possible, in the box by absurd and silly
perjuries. At the end, of course, I was arrested, and your father became
the hero of the hour.

As far as I can make out, I ended my friendship with you every three
months regularly. And each time that I did so you managed by means of
entreaties, telegrams, letters, the interposition of your friends, the
interposition of mine, and the like to induce me to allow you back.

But the froth and folly of our life grew often very wearisome to me: it
was only in the mire that we met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating
though the one[47] topic round which your talk invariably centered was,
still at the end it became quite monotonous to me. I was often bored to
death by it, and accepted it as I accepted your passion for music halls,
or your mania for absurd extravagance in eating and drinking, or any
other of your to me less attractive characteristics, as a thing that is
to say, that one simply had to put up with, a part of the high price one
had to pay for knowing you.

When you came one Monday evening to my rooms, accompanied by two[48] of
your friends, I found myself actually flying abroad next morning to
escape from you, giving my family some absurd reason for my sudden
departure, and leaving a false address with my servant for fear you
might follow me by the next train....

Our friendship had always been a source of distress to my wife: not
merely because she had never liked you personally, but because she saw
how your continual companionship altered me, and not for the better.

You started without delay for Paris, sending me passionate telegrams on
the road to beg me to see you once, at any rate. I declined. You arrived
in Paris late on a Saturday night and found a brief letter from me
waiting for you at your hotel stating that I would not see you. Next
morning I received in Tite Street a telegram of some ten or eleven pages
in length from you. You stated in it that no matter what you had done to
me you could not believe that I would absolutely decline to see you; you
reminded me that for the sake of seeing me even for one hour you had
travelled six days and six nights across Europe without stopping once on
the way; you made what I must admit was a most pathetic appeal, and
ended with what seemed to me a threat of suicide and one not thinly
veiled. You had yourself often told me how many of your race there had
been who had stained their hands in their own blood: your uncle
certainly, your grandfather possibly; many others in the mad bad line
from which you come. Pity, my old affection for you, regard for your
mother, to whom your death under such dreadful circumstances would have
been a blow almost too great for her to bear, the horror of the idea
that so young a life, and one that amidst all its ugly faults had still
promise of beauty in it, should come to so revolting an end, mere
humanity itself--all these, if excuses be necessary, must serve as an
excuse for consenting to accord you one last interview. When I arrived
in Paris, your tears breaking out again and again all through the
evening, and falling over your cheeks like rain as we sat at dinner
first at Voisin's, at supper at Paillard's afterwards, the unfeigned joy
you evinced at seeing me, holding my hand whenever you could, as though
you were a gentle and penitent child; your contrition, so simple and
sincere at the moment made me consent to renew our friendship. Two days
after we had returned to London, your father saw you having luncheon
with me at the Cafe Royal, joined my table, drank of my wine, and that
afternoon, through a letter addressed to you, began his first attack on
me.... It may be strange, but I had once again, I will not say the
chance, but the duty, of separating from you forced on me. I need hardly
remind you that I refer to your conduct to me at Brighton from October
10th to 13th, 1894. Three years is a long time for you to go back. But
we who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow,
have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter
moments. We have nothing else to think of. Suffering, curious as it may
sound to you, is the means by which we exist, because it is the only
means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of
suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence,
of our continued identity. Between myself and the memory of joy lies a
gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality. Had
our life together been as the world fancied it to be, one simply of
pleasure, profligacies and laughter, I would not be able to recall a
single passage in it. It is because it was full of moments and days
tragic, bitter, sinister in their warnings, dull or dreadful in their
monotonous scenes and unseemly violences, that I can see or hear each
separate incident in its detail, can indeed see or hear little else. So
much in this place do men live by pain that my friendship with you, in
the way through which I am forced to remember it, appears to me always
as a prelude consonant with those varying modes of anguish which each
day I have to realise, nay more, to necessitate them even; as though my
life, whatever it had seemed to myself and others, had all the while
been a real symphony of sorrow, passing through its rhythmically linked
movements to its certain resolution, with that inevitableness that in
Art characterises the treatment of every great theme.... I spoke of your
conduct to me on three successive days three years ago, did I not?

I entertained you, of course, I had no option in the matter; but
elsewhere, and not in my own home. The next day, Monday, your companion
returned to the duties[49] of his profession, and you stayed with me.
Bored with Worthing, and still more, I have no doubt, with my fruitless
efforts to concentrate my attention on my play, the only thing that
really interested me at the moment, you insist on being taken to the
Grand Hotel at Brighton.

The night we arrive you fall ill with that dreadful low fever that is
foolishly called the influenza, your second, if not your third, attack.
I need not remind you how I waited on you, and tended you, not merely
with every luxury of fruit, flowers, presents, books and the like that
money can procure, but with that affection, tenderness and love that,
whatever you may think, is not to be procured for money. Except for an
hour's walk in the morning, an hour's drive in the afternoon, I never
left the hotel. I got special grapes from London for you as you did not
care for those the hotel supplied; invented things to please you;
remained either with you or in the room next to yours; sat with you
every evening to quiet or amuse you.

After four or five days you recover, and I take lodgings in order to try
and finish my play. You, of course, accompany me. The morning after the
day on which we were installed I feel extremely ill.

The doctor finds I have caught the influenza from you.

There is no manservant to wait on me, not even any one to send out on a
message, or to get what the doctor orders. But you are there. I feel no
alarm. The next two days you leave me entirely alone without care,
without attendance, without anything. It was not a question of grapes,
flowers and charming gifts: it was a question of mere necessities.

And when I was left all day without anything to read, you calmly tell me
that you bought the book I wanted, and that they had promised to send it
down, a statement which I found by chance afterwards to have been
entirely untrue, from beginning to end. All the while you are, of
course, living at my expense, driving about, dining at the Grand Hotel,
and indeed only appearing in my room for money. On the Saturday night,
you having completely left me unattended and alone since the morning, I
asked you to come back after dinner, and sit with me for a little. With
irritable voice and ungracious manner you promise to do so. I wait till
11 o'clock, and you never appear.

At three in the morning, unable to sleep, and tortured with thirst, I
made my way in the dark and cold, down to the sitting-room in the hopes
of finding some water there. I found you. You fell on me with every
hideous word an intemperate mood, an undisciplined and untutored nature
could suggest. By the terrible alchemy of egotism you converted your
remorse into rage. You accused me of selfishness in expecting you to be
with me when I was ill; of standing between you and your amusements; of
trying to deprive you of your pleasures.

You told me, and I know it was quite true, that you had come back at
midnight simply in order to change your dress-clothes, and go out again.

I told you at length to leave the room; you pretended to do so, but when
I lifted up my head from the pillow in which I had buried it, you were
still there, and with brutality of laughter and hysteria of rage you
moved suddenly towards me. A sense of horror came over me, for what
exact reason I could not make out; but I got out of my bed at once, and
bare-footed and just as I was, made my way down the two nights of stairs
to the sitting-room.

You returned silently for money; took what you could find on the
dressing table, and mantelpiece, and left the house with your luggage.
Need I tell you what I thought of you during the two lonely wretched
days of illness that followed? Is it necessary for me to state, that I
saw clearly that it would be a dishonour to myself to continue even an
acquaintance with such a one as you had showed yourself to be? That I
recognised that the ultimate moment had come and recognised it as being
really a great relief? And that I knew that for the future my art and
life would be freer and better and more beautiful in every possible way?
Ill as I was, I felt at ease. The fact that the separation was
irrevocable gave me peace.

Wednesday was my birthday. Amongst the telegrams and communications on
my table was a letter in your handwriting. I opened it with a sense of
sadness on me. I knew that the time had gone by when a pretty phrase, an
expression of affection, a word of sorrow, would make me take you back.
But I was entirely deceived. I had underrated you.

You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving the sick bed, on my
sudden flight downstairs. "It was an ugly moment for you," you said,
"uglier than you imagine." Ah! I felt it but too well. What it had
really meant I do not know; whether you had with you the pistol you had
bought to try to frighten your father with, and that thinking it to be
unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company;
whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner knife that by
chance was lying on the table between us; whether forgetting in your
rage your low[50] stature and inferior strength, you had thought of some
special personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there; I could not
tell. I do not know to the present moment. All I know is that a feeling
of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left
the room at once and got away, you would have done or tried to do
something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong
shame....

On your return to town from the actual scene of the tragedy to which you
had been summoned, you came at once to me very sweetly and very simply,
in your suit of woe, and with your eyes dim with tears. You sought
consolation and help, as a child might seek it. I opened to you my
house, my home, my heart. I made your sorrow mine also, that you might
have help in bearing it. Never even by one word, did I allude to your
conduct towards me, to the revolting scenes, and the revolting letter.

The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to
scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle,
humane, loving. But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would
not now be weeping in this terrible place.

Of course, I discern in all our relations, not destiny merely, but
Doom--Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding
of blood. Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is
horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its
own life, or on the lives of others.

In every little circumstance in which the ways of our lives met, in
every point of great or seemingly trivial import in which you came to me
for pleasure or help, in the small chances, the slight accidents that
look, in their relation to life, to be no more than the dust that dances
in a beam, or the leaf that flutters from a tree, ruin followed like the
echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey.

Our friendship really begins with your begging me, in a most pathetic
and charming letter, to assist you in a position appalling to anyone,
doubly so to a young man at Oxford. I do so, and ultimately, through
your using my name as your friend with Sir George Lewis I begin to lose
his esteem and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years' standing. When
I was deprived of his advice and help and regard, I was deprived of the
one great safeguard of my life. You send me a very nice poem of the
undergraduate school of verse for my approval. I reply by a letter of
fantastic literary conceits; I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth,
Jonquil or Narcissus, or some one whom the Great God of Poetry favoured,
and honoured with his love. The letter is like a passage from one of
Shakespeare's sonnets transposed to a minor key.

It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy, if
wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either
university who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he
would have sufficient wit, or culture, to interpret rightly its
fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from
you into the hands of a loathsome companion[51], from him to a gang of
blackmailers, copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to
the manager[52] of the theatre where my work is being performed, every
construction but the right one is put on it, society is thrilled with
the absurd rumours that I have had to pay a high sum of money for having
written an infamous letter to you; this forms the basis of your father's
worst attack.

I produce the original letter myself in court to show what it really is;
it is denounced by your father's counsel as a revolting and insidious
attempt to corrupt innocence; ultimately it forms part of a criminal
charge; the crown takes it up; the judge sums up on it with little
learning and much morality; I go to prison for it at last. That is the
result of writing you a charming letter.

It makes me feel sometimes as if you yourself had been merely a puppet
worked by some secret and unseen hand to bring terrible events to a
terrible issue. But puppets themselves have passions. They will bring a
new plot into what they are presenting, and twist the ordered issue of
vicissitude to suit some whim or appetite of their own. To be entirely
free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal
paradox of human life that we realise at every moment; and this, I often
think, is the only explanation possible of your nature, if indeed for
the profound and terrible mystery of a human soul there is any
explanation at all, except one that makes the mystery all the more
marvellous still.

I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy, and that you were to
be one of the graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and
repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great
catastrophe, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of
narrowed will power, was yourself stripped of the mask of joy and
pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been deceived and led astray.

The memory of our friendship is the shadow that walks with me here: that
seems never to leave me: that wakes me up at night to tell me the same
story over and over till its wearisome iteration makes all sleep abandon
me till dawn: at dawn it begins again: it follows me into the prison
yard and makes me talk to myself as I tramp round: each detail that
accompanied each dreadful moment I am forced to recall: there is nothing
that happened in those ill-starred years that I cannot recreate in that
chamber of the brain which is set apart for grief or for despair; every
strained note of your voice, every twitch and gesture of your nervous
hands, every bitter word, every poisonous phrase comes back to me: I
remember the street or river down which we passed: the wall or woodland
that surrounded us; at what figure on the dial stood the hands of the
clock; which way went the wings of the wind, the shape and colour of the
moon.

There is, I know, one answer to all that I have said to you, and that is
that you loved me: that all through those two and a half years during
which the fates were weaving into one scarlet pattern the threads of our
divided lives you really loved me.

Though I saw quite clearly that my position in the world of art, the
interest that my personality had always excited, my money, the luxury in
which I lived, the thousand and one things that went to make up a life
so charmingly and so wonderfully improbable as mine was, were, each and
all of them, elements that fascinated you and made you cling to me; yet
besides all this there was something more, some strange attraction for
you: you loved me far better than you loved anyone else. But you, like
myself, have had a terrible tragedy in your life, though one of an
entirely opposite character to mine. Do you want to learn what it was?
It was this. In you, hate was always stronger than love. Your hatred[53]
of your father was of such stature that it entirely outstripped,
overgrew, and overshadowed your love of me. There was no struggle
between them at all, or but little; of such dimensions was your hatred
and of such monstrous growth. You did not realise that there was no room
for both passions in the same soul: they cannot live together in that
fair carven house. Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become
wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are; by which we
can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone, we can understand
others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and
finely conceived, can feed love. But anything will feed hate. There was
not a glass of champagne that you drank, not a rich dish that you ate of
in all those years, that did not feed your hate and make it fat. So to
gratify it, you gambled with my life, as you gambled with my money,
carelessly, recklessly, indifferent to the consequences. If you lost,
the loss would not, you fancied, be yours. If you won, yours, you knew,
would be the exultation and the advantages of victory.

Hate blinds people. You were not aware of that. Love can read the
writing on the remotest star, but hate so blinded you that you could see
no further than the narrow, walled in, and already lust-withered garden
of your common desires. Your terrible lack of imagination, the one
really fatal defect in your character, was entirely the result of the
hate that lived in you. Subtly, silently, and in secret, hate gnawed at
your nature, as the lichen bites at the root of some sallow plant, till
you grew to see nothing but the most meagre interests and the most petty
aims. That faculty in you which love would have fostered, hate poisoned
and paralysed.

The idea of your being the object of a terrible quarrel between your
father and a man of my position seemed to delight you.

You scented the chance of a public scandal and flew to it. The prospect
of a battle in which you would be safe delighted you.

You know what my art was to me, the great primal note by which I had
revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world, the
great passion of my life, the love to which all other loves were as
marsh water to red wine, or the glow worm of the marsh to the magic
mirror of the moon.... Don't you understand now that your lack of
imagination was the one really fatal defect of your character? What you
had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you; but hate had
blinded you, and you could see nothing.

Life is quite lovely to you. And yet, if you are wise, and wish to find
life much lovelier still, and in a different manner you will let the
reading of this terrible letter--for such I know it is--prove to you as
important a crisis and turning point of your life as the writing of it
is to me. Your pale face used to flush easily with wine or pleasure. If,
as you read what is here written, it from time to time becomes scorched,
as though by a furnace blast, with shame, it will be all the better for
you. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.

How clearly I saw it then, as now, I need not tell you. But I said to
myself, "At all costs I must keep love in my heart. If I go into prison
without love, what will become of my soul?" The letters I wrote to you
at that time from Holloway were my efforts to keep love as the dominant
note of my own nature. I could, if I had chosen, have torn you to pieces
with bitter reproaches. I could have rent you with maledictions.

The sins of another were being placed to my account. Had I so chosen, I
could on either trial have saved myself at his expense, not from shame
indeed, but from imprisonment.[54] Had I cared to show that the crown
witnesses--the three most important--had been carefully coached by your
father and his solicitors, not in reticences merely, but in assertions,
in the absolute transference deliberate, plotted, and rehearsed, of the
actions and doings of someone else on to me, I could have had each one
of them dismissed from the box by the judge, more summarily than even
wretched perjured Atkins was. I could have walked out of court with my
tongue in my cheek, and my hands in my pockets, a free man. The
strongest pressure was put upon me to do so, I was earnestly advised,
begged, entreated to do so by people, whose sole interest was my
welfare, and the welfare of my house. But I refused. I did not choose to
do so. I have never regretted my decision for a single moment, even in
the most bitter periods of my imprisonment. Such a course of action
would have been beneath me. Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are
maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the
soul alone are shameful. To have secured my acquittal by such means
would have been a life-long torture to me. But do you really think that
you were worthy of the love I was showing you then, or that for a single
moment I thought you were? Do you really think that any period of our
friendship you were worthy of the love I showed you, or that for a
single moment I thought you were? I knew you were not. But love does not
traffic in a market place, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like
the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of love is to
love; no more, and no less. You were my enemy; such an enemy as no man
ever had. I had given you my life; and to gratify the lowest and most
contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had
thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me from
every point of view.

After my terrible sentence, when the prison dress was on me, and the
prison house closed, I sat amidst the ruins of my wonderful life,
crushed by anguish, bewildered with terror, dazed through pain. But I
would not hate you. Every day I said to myself, "I must keep love in my
heart to-day, else how shall I live through the day?" I reminded myself
that you meant no evil to me at any rate....

It all flashed across me, and I remember that for the first and last
time in my entire prison life, I laughed. In that laugh was all the
scorn of all the world. Prince Fleur de lys! I saw that nothing that had
happened had made you realise a single thing. You were, in your own
eyes, still the graceful prince of a trivial comedy, not the sombre
figure of a tragic show.

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